February 04, 2010

Architecture, Mont Blanc, and, eventually, sand

One of the great enjoyments of rambling around the blogosphere is the
discovery of new stories and connections and simply the journey you take in the
process. I was fascinated by Geoff Manaugh's recent
post on BLDG BLG on an artificial island in Montenegro's Bay of Kotor whose
construction began in the 15th century. The island was built of rocks thrown
into the bay as a foundation for a chapel, and the tradition continues
today:

Throwing stones into the bay and, in the process, incrementally expanding the
island's surface area, has apparently become a local religious tradition: "The
custom of throwing rocks into the sea is alive even nowadays. Every year on the
sunset of July 22, an event called fašinada,
when local residents take their boats and throw rocks into the sea, widening the
surface of the island, takes place.

It seems that Manaugh happened upon this by chance ("Somehow this morning I
ended reading about an artificial island and devotional chapel...") and his
comments set me off on my own serendipitous journey. Towards the end of the post
was the following comment:

This idea intrigued me and I followed the link to Barcelona architect Vicente
Guallart's site; I looked at the project titled "Howtomakeamountain" and
found myself somewhat bemused, as is often the case when I try to penetrate the
prose of creative design and architecture. The project addresses "The
re-generation of Denia’s Castle hill," Denia being a town in the Costa Blanca
overlooked by an 11th century castle. Part of the project description reads as
follows:

The limestone of the hill and its rhombohedric crystals of calcite enabled us
to conceive, at multiple scales, a crystalline genesis for the project. A
coherent system, from the structure itself to its outer limit, that responds to
a single system of crystallization. In this way, the skin, like soil in the
hills, directly reflects the internal logic of the mass and its interaction with
the environment. In this case, the rhombohedric system generates a hexagonal
geometry that will be the geometric base of the ‘gene’ (a hexagonal
micro-topography that can be combined all over its faces) that will initiate the
process of constructing the skin. This gene will set in motion the re-generation
of the hill.

Bemused? However, I was interested in the illustrations, amongst which were
several superb and meticulously observed pen and ink or pencil drawings of what
would seem to be Alpine and glacial geology, for example:

Associated with these were various illustrations that appeared to show a
geometric analysis of the mountain form and architecture (and a clear reference
to Guallart's "rhombohedric system"):

Finally, I could see the source of these illustrations: "Eugène
Viollet-le-Duc, Le Massif du Mont-Blanc." Now this came as something
of a shock - I had come across the work of Viollet-le-Duc on several occasions,
but never as an observer of glacial geology and mountain structure. He was a
19th century French architect, best known for his exuberant and imaginative
restorations of ancient buildings, amongst them Mont-Saint-Michel and
the medieval fortress city of Carcassone.

I say "imaginative" for Viollet-le-Duc's "restorations" were, and continue to
be highly controversial - more often than not, the results bore little
resemblance to the original; he wrote that restoration is a "means to
reestablish [a building] to a finished state, which may in fact never have
actually existed at any given time." This is certainly true of Carcassonne:

But le-Duc was a highly respected practitioner of both architectural reality
and theory, considered to be one of the fathers of modern architecture and a
known inspiration for Gaudi.
But Mont Blanc and geology? I continued my quest and discovered that in
1876, towards the end of his life, he published the results of his time spent
observing, documenting, and drawing the Mont Blanc massif. The entire text and
illustrations are, miraculously, available online (in French) at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5400922n.image.langFR.f6.vignettesnaviguer.
I've only begun to look at this work, but as a contemporary of Ruskin and an
example of the fascination of the times with mountains and the concept of "the
sublime" (so superbly described in Robert Macfarlane's Mountains
of the Mind), le-Duc's observations are fascinating. I thought
back to my own travels around the Mont-Blanc region a couple of years ago, and
looked at my own photographs through the spectacles of le-Duc's geometrical
"deconstruction."

And it would seem that le-Duc's observations of glaciers are today of value
in reconstructing glacial retreat in the Alps - his work endures in many
ways!

Continuing my journey, I then discovered a "novelette" that le-Duc had
written shortly before his death. Histoire d’un dessinateur (literally,
story of a drawer - in the artistic sense) is the tale of a young lad, the son
of a gardener, taken under the wing of his father's employer, an artist whose
own son has none of the talents of the gardener's boy. The story is summarised
at http://www.gombrich.co.uk/showdoc.php?id=107 where
I came upon the following description and illustration:

The book then follows his pilgrimage through geometry, trigonometry, botany,
anatomy, zoology, perspective, etc. Much of this is an admirably clear account
of these disciplines and their practical application, substantially illustrated
with careful and detailed diagrams and drawings, such as the one in which we see
little Jean tracing the contour lines of a sandheap while M. Majorin sternly
watches him, measuring rod in hand.

Thank you for this very interesting "reverse" discovery of Viollet-le-Duc's Mont-Blanc. In fact, he spent 8 years after he was fired from the "Ecole des Beaux-Arts", studying the Mont-Blanc, witch he called "the monument of Europe". He dealt with geology, geomorphology, cartography aso is "pseudo horogénèse" was by force completely false, but by the way he was such a smart pragmatic observer that at the end of the story his performance was quite clever. In 1988 et 1993 i published two books on the relationship of VLD and the mountains.